Step 2: Establish key performance indicators (KPI) for your content marketing strategy

“What are the measures that are going to help me understand and maximize my progress toward meeting goals? I am focusing on communication strategies and the metrics to measure them to help us grow and deepen engagement of our community. I want to be sure I'm doing a couple things, that I'm developing high value content, so how high value is our content in meeting needs, and then the second dimension is how effective is our content at deepening engagement and prompting investment, so converting membership? ... This is a little corny, but I feel like content is paving the road of the member journey because it's what gets people excited. They're looking for solutions, we’re getting them excited about coming to us, to take an action to engage with us.

I like to express our metrics with an action verb because it gets us with the right mindset. That’s my general rule: How does the content motivate people to take action? Opening things, logging in, downloading, taking social actions, joining, registering, participating, subscribing, creating an account. Think about telling a story about what’s happening with your members or your audience.

(I) love the term customer journey, because it’s a real journey. It’s a story. It’s not just numbers. The numbers are a way to tell the story,and if you can’t use them that way, they’re not really helping anyone.

Betsy Reid, Peak Grantmaking, Association of Grantmaking Professionals